May 2005

If this works, then the blog Tricks of the Trade will have contributed a true service to mankind:

There is a better way to remove a price tag from a gift than trying to peel it off with your fingernail. Place a piece of tape over the sticker and rub it with your finger, leaving an end to pull on. Then rip the tape off like you would a band-aid, and the price tag will go with it.

Apparently back in February The Guardian put up an 8-page Joe Sacco comic from Iraq. It’s a 37-meg PDF download, to forewarn you, but it’s a quick, interesting look at the war through a keen set of eyes. It’s not as good as his Pulitzer-winning effort in Palestine or his reporting in Eastern Europe, mostly because he’s embedded with the troops this time rather than speaking with civilians, but it’s probably different from any other Iraq war coverage you’ve seen. (Via MadInkBeard.)

In 1947, Raymond Queneau wrote the same simple story about a man on a train 99 different ways. The book Exercises in Style became a bestseller in France, and its English translation is in its second edition. (You can find it here in French.)

This year, Matt Madden wants to do the same thing with comics. His forthcoming book, also called Exercises in Style, retells the mundane tale of a man on a late-night trip to the fridge in 99 different incarnations. A preview of the book is available on Madden’s Web site.

I love the way this little storytelling gimmick fuels the imagination. The way you can spend lifetimes thinking about how meaning shifts in each quarto of a Shakespeare play, flipping through a few of Madden’s exercises can make his nothing little characters come alive in your mind. As you move from drawing to drawing and note the changes in perspective or tone, you can imagine rich interior worlds. In one variation, the trip to the fridge is frightening. In another, it’s fantastical. If you’re like me, by the time you’ve clicked through just a few, you begin to understand the fridge-goer as a character on some deep existential quest.

But my favorite thing on the site is a variation submitted by one of Madden’s guest artists, S

Zephyr Teachout, director of internet organizing for the Dean campaign back in tha day, has a new post up that’s framed by her “working meta-theory of the world”:

The idea is that there are three ascendant forces in the world — multinational corporations, radical theocracy, and civic democracy. Whichever one of these three figures out how to use the collective action solving power of the internet the best– well, wins. Defines world history for the next few centuries. Dominates.